A look inside the struggle for housing in Buenos Aires, Argentina

From housing crisis to housing justice: Towards a radical right to a home

“…This suggests the financialisation of housing has considerable importance when it comes to urban struggles, with housing clearly politicised in new ways. On the one hand, these findings further support the idea of housing as a political subject and a space of resistance (Fields, 2017;Lancione, 2019;Madden and Marcuse, 2016;Mun˜oz, 2017). On the other hand, a significant finding from this research involves the novel ways anti-racism activists have highlighted how the housing crisis reinforces oppression against the more vulnerable groups in Ireland, such as migrants.…”

“…Recent trends in the areas of housing mobilisation have led to a proliferation of studies that focus on the contemporary struggles for the right to a home, in which increasing rents, dispossession, insecurity of tenure and lack of affordable housing have become a crucial battleground. This work has highlighted the resistance to housing precarity in multiple locations (Fields, 2017;Lancione, 2019), analysed the shifts in politico-economic policies that create housing inequality (Alexander et al, 2018;Madden and Marcuse, 2016), examined the mass movements demanding a state response to evictions and foreclosures in the context of housing crises (Martinez, 2018;Mun˜oz, 2017), documented the newly created spaces of resistance, social organisation and networks of solidarity (Garcı´a-Lamarca, 2017) and focused on the emergence of housing precarity and renters as a political subject (Byrne, 2019;Listerborn et al, 2020;Wilde, 2019). The recent political phase of housing activism brings into question how housing action-protest can reclaim housing, invigorate resistance to the privatisation of housing, restructure relations and, ultimately, implement organisational styles that are inclusive and that challenge neoliberal housing development models.…”

Middle-class struggles against high-rise construction in Buenos Aires. Urban democratization or enforcement of particular interests?

“…It is a permanent struggle, as a delegate explained in the interview: "You take a territory and modify the CPU; we always do fragments." Similar to the conflicts around housing shortage (e.g., Caggiano et al, 2012;Muñoz, 2017), the judges who represent an "anti-Macri position", as a sociologist underlined, (BP16) regard the groupings favorably. Furthermore, an increasing extent of institutionalization has facilitated judicial processes: Besides the Division of Urban Heritage created by the Defense of the People of the city of Buenos Aires in 2009, the General Defense of the city of Buenos Aires established a special technical unit for urban heritage with a proper defense attorney in 2012.…”

Homeownership, mobility, and home: A relational housing study of Argentine Ludar and Romanian Rudari

“…Argentina also drastically cut back on social and public housing provision in the 1990 s ( Van Gelder et al, 2016 , Zanetta, 2002 ). Mass privatisation, rent deregulation, and disinvestment in public and social housing proved further deathblows for the inclusiveness of Romanian ( Amann et al, 2013 , Cinà, 2010 , Nae and Turnock, 2011 , Teodorescu, 2018 ) and Argentine cities ( Muñoz, 2017 , Monkkonen and Ronconi, 2013 , Roitman, 2005 , Van Gelder et al, 2016 ).…”

“…In the period since the establishment of the ANL (1998), large-scale evictions could not be averted ( Ion, 2014 , Lancione, 2017 , Lancione, 2019b , Chelcea et al, 2015 ). In Argentina, the FHP failed to meet expectations to revive the construction of public housing: after minor successes in its first years, construction figures stayed far below the projected 420,000 new housing units ( Di Virgilio, 2017 , Muñoz, 2017 ) – an insufficient number in any case. Instead, privately financed real estate booms took place in the 2000s after the Romanian and Argentine economy quickly recovered.…”